EXPOSED Living with scandal, rumour, and gossip L /� MIA-MARIE HAMMARLIN EXPOSED Living with scandal, rumour, and gossip Exposed Living with scandal, rumour, and gossip MIA-MARIE HAMMARLIN Lund University Press Copyright © Mia-Marie Hammarlin 2019 The right of Mia-Marie Hammarlin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Lund University Press The Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology P.O. Box 117 SE-221 00 LUND Sweden http://lunduniversitypress.lu.se Lund University Press books are published in collaboration with Manchester University Press. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library An earlier version of this book appeared in Swedish, published by Hammarlin Bokförlag in 2015 as I stormens öga ISBN 978-91-9793-812-9 ISBN 978-91-983768-3-8 hardback ISBN 978-91-983768-4-5 open access First published 2019 An electronic version of this book is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence, thanks to the support of Lund University, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. 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Cover image: © Lars Hammarlin Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Lund University Press gratefully acknowledges publication assistance from the Thora Ohlsson Foundation ( Thora Ohlssons Stiftelse ) Contents Introduction page 1 The project and purpose of this book 4 Previous research and theoretical points of departure 5 Affects, emotions, feelings 8 The lifeworld 12 Swedish scandals in an international perspective 15 The low level of corruption and the high level of trust in Sweden 17 The meaning of the concepts 21 Bricolage as a method 23 A methodological experiment 25 Flashback Forum 26 The interviews 27 1 In the middle of the media storm 31 The food-and-sleep clock 31 The paradox of visibility and loneliness 35 The branding and the escape 40 Shame, self-contempt, and laughter 48 Lies and damned lies 58 Family, love, caring 63 Fellowship-of-the-hounded letters 68 How things change 72 Concluding comment 75 2 Gossip, rumour, and scandals 77 Mediated orality 77 Chronique scandaleuse 81 Gossip and scandals in today’s media system 85 Digital town squares 87 vi Contents The rumour about Under-Secretary of State Ingmar Ohlsson 89 Hot topics 96 The spatial and the social dimension 101 The role as an exemplum 104 Concluding comment 105 3 Floorball Dad 107 Confusion 110 Anxiety, fear, and community 115 A child’s sense of vulnerability 118 The police interrogations 119 The pale cast of thought 120 News legends 123 Passing-down and narrative contagion 126 Fake news as folklore 128 Concluding comment 129 4 The journalists and the rabbits 131 The objectivity talisman 132 Scepticism – media scandals, do they exist? 136 Undignified behaviour and a lack of independence 139 The art of justifying one’s actions 143 Honour, fame, and rabbits 149 Feeling empathy 154 Concluding comment 163 Concluding words 165 Appendix 169 Bibliography 182 Index 197 Introduction At long last, twenty-seven-year-old housekeeper Katharina Blum has had enough. She raises her gun and kills reporter Werner Tötges with multiple shots. The murder takes place on a Sunday around lunchtime in Miss Blum’s previously so neat and tidy flat, which is now a study in disorder. Tötges had come there to interview her. He worked for ‘die ZEITUNG’ – in capital letters (‘the News ’ in the English translation) – which had for several days dragged Blum through the dirt, had indeed ruined her entire life. And not just her life, but also the lives of members of her family. This brutal murder of a journalist opens Nobel Prize laureate Heinrich Böll’s novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum , which sold well and occasioned debate in West Germany when it was published in 1974. The reader follows the repercussions of the cynical headlines in everyday life, described in a documentary style characterised by ironic distance. Scenes depict the concealed and open loathing to which Miss Blum is subjected. Neighbours whisper, gossip, and spread malicious rumours about her, she who was previously, before the scandalous articles, known as a loyal, proud, and correct woman. Now they stare at her and no longer want to ride in the lift with her. They avoid or attack her. Friends desert her. Acquaintances make statements about her being a shady character. Anonymous men call her at night and breathe heavily into the receiver. The newspaper’s obsession with the crime Blum has supposedly committed – before the murder, that is; throughout the novel, she is accused of harbouring a fugitive from justice – gives rise to inventive interpretations of the statements made by the people around her. When Blum’s aged mother exclaims in despair, ‘Why did it have to end like this, why did it have to come to this?’, Tötges translates this into ‘It was bound to come to this, it was bound to end like this.’ The justification for the change is that he, as a 2 Exposed reporter, is used to ‘helping simple people to express themselves more clearly’. 1 Heinrich Böll himself regarded the story of Katharina Blum as a pamphlet in the sense of a polemical piece of writing which describes a person who is subjected to the most profound public humiliation through a relentless campaign of demonisation. This is a form of violation, the writer claimed, that leads to Blum losing her sense of belonging in society and being exiled into a barren landscape of loneliness. In this context, the subtitle of the book makes sense: ‘How violence develops and where it can lead’. The murder of the journalist can be seen as a grim metaphor for Miss Blum’s defenceless- ness against the mudslinging and the prying into the smallest details of her life that characterise this kind of journalism. Böll wrote in anger and claimed that even the headlining done at a newspaper’s editorial office can be defined as a form of violation. His wrath against what he called the Boulevardpresse (gutter press), and especially the tabloid Bild-Zeitung , did not abate over time. Ten years after the original publication of the novel, he wrote the following in a postscript: ‘It would be a task for criminology some day to investigate the problems newspapers can cause in all their bestial “innocence”’ (Böll 2011:153). His powerful feelings were not only expressed in statements like this one but also in the book itself, where the characters are torn between hope and despair, a desire for revenge and shame, fury and powerlessness. While Böll’s story arose from a peculiarly charged political background, it nevertheless provides insights into the possible social consequences of scandal journalism, and here I do not mean the dramatic act of vengeance carried out by Miss Blum. Four decades after the publication of Böll’s controversial book came the release of an award-winning documentary about the much-criticised American congressman Anthony Weiner. Like The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum , the film, which is simply called Weiner , supplies insights into the contagious effects that lurk in every scandal: the scandal does not simply revolve around the main figure but also pulls in the people in the immediate vicinity of the scandalised person. By way of the invasive camera, it is Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner’s wife, who is made to symbolise this fact. Her naked, 1 All three quotations may be found in Heinrich Böll, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, or: How, [sic] Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead , trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: Penguin, 1975), p. 105. Introduction 3 shifting facial expressions stay with the viewer: she is sometimes determined, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes angry, sometimes in despair. The look she occasionally gives her husband, in connection with the exposure of his frequent sex-chatting with young women, is heavy with venom. As his electoral support plummets, she seems to hate him while at the same time, almost reluctantly, loving his increasingly broken figure. Her vulnerability is beyond question, and it appears to be on a par with that of her husband, or perhaps even greater than his. The whole thing is excruciating to watch. And very entertaining. It should, by way of introduction, be said that media landscapes differ a great deal from one country to another. Scandals in Sweden cannot be directly compared to scandals in the United States, or to scandals in other parts of the world for that matter. At the same time, scandals are connected across the borders of countries and across continents, not only through the universal, emotional experi- ences undergone by the main figures of these scandals and their families, but also through a kind of resilience over time that characterises the phenomenon in question. This is one of the things that the present book will demonstrate. What is unique about the stories of the fictive character Katha- rina Blum and the real-life Anthony Weiner is that they succeed in illuminating dimensions of media scandals that have escaped the attention of many people, not least scholars: the scandals in no way play out in the media only; they find their sustenance, their breath of life, outside the media, in regular everyday conversations and interactions between people. Ultimately this deficiency has to do with a limited interpretation of media in the term media scandal , where it is assumed that scholars agree on what this word means. There are, of course, those who recognise and are interested in the complexity of the phenomenon; in the present publication I refer to several of these researchers, and like them I want to investigate media scandals as social and cultural phenomena. The scandals neither begin nor end in the newsrooms but branch out into people’s everyday lives and take shape through a number of different, interconnected forms of communication. Media scan- dals say something essential about how we get along with one another. After having sat face to face with several people who have been at the centre of this type of reporting, and journalists who have contributed to it in one way or another, listening to their stories, I am convinced that this is true. But let us begin at the beginning. 4 Exposed The project and purpose of this book This book was written within the framework of a multidisciplinary research project financed by the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology at Lund University. The project, which is called ‘Medie- drevets mekanismer och aktörer’ (‘Media houndings – mechanisms and actors’), should, according to its description, include perspectives from media and communication studies as well as from ethnology applied to the phenomenon of mediated scandals. It is directed by myself, an ethnologist, former journalist, and Senior Lecturer of Media and Communication Studies, and by Gunilla Jarlbro, Professor of Media and Communication Studies. Both of us are active at the Department of Communication and Media at Lund University. In previous project publications we have combined quantitative and qualitative data, for instance in a detailed study of the so-called ‘Toblerone affair’ – with the then Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, Mona Sahlin, in the leading role (Hammarlin & Jarlbro 2012) – and in the book Kvinnor och män i offentlighetens ljus (‘Women and men in the public eye’; Hammarlin & Jarlbro 2014). In another study we foreground perspectives from cultural history on public scandals, where the view of these as a typical present-day phenomenon is problematised (Hammarlin 2013a). The historical perspectives provide the focus of yet another ongoing research project, which is a kind of extension of the one mentioned above and funded by the foundation Ridderstads Stiftelse (Hammarlin & Jönsson 2017:93–115). The orientation of the present book is ethnological and phenom- enological. I want to bring out more or less forgotten universal human existential aspects of media scandals, among other things by paying attention to the emotions of the affected parties. They feel what most of us would have experienced if we had ended up at the centre of a scandal, that is, anything from shame and self- contempt to grief, anxiety, fear, anger, and the desire for revenge. Because emotions – which are of course relational in nature – bind us together as people and help us enter into one another’s lifeworlds, this is what I have chosen as my analytical point of departure. By giving space to people – and their families – who have experienced media scandals from within in their roles as protagonists, I hope to be able to increase the understanding of what a media scandal does to the life of an individual, but also of what these people do with the media scandal, considered as an experience. Introduction 5 The purpose is dual, but intertwined: my intention is partly to explore the emotional experience of being the main figure of a media scandal, partly to study the complex media circuits that create the scandal. The following questions accompany this study: What does the scandal feel like for the person who is affected by it, and what can these emotions teach us about both people and media? How is the scandal as a phenomenon possible, i.e., through which media and which journalistic genres, in a wide sense, is it created? And in relation to this: how is the scandal created and re-created through gossip and rumour? The last question underlines my special interest in the relationship between oral, interpersonal, face-to-face communication and com- munication via traditional and digital media, where I find folkloristic perspectives on news particularly useful. I will also investigate the relationship between the persons who are written about and the reporters who stir up and add fuel to media scandals. The reporters also experience and live through the scandals via the practice of their profession. I wished to establish a dialogue between people at opposing ends of the drama after the scandal has died down. They do not encounter one another in reality; but they meet here, in the text, through language. For this reason attention is paid not only to research about media scandals, but also to a number of published texts written by Swedish journalists who deal with the phenomenon critically and with curiosity. Such a reflective text was written by the internationally well-respected Swedish publicist and author Göran Rosenberg (2000). He describes journalists who, like beaters and hounds, hunt ‘rabbits’, i.e., the central figures of the scandals – an allegory to which I keep returning. Perhaps the purpose of a study can also be expressed in a negation. If so, it would sound like this: the purpose is not to persuade the reader to feel sorry for the affected individuals. Instead, the accounts of experiences should be considered as an indispensable source for understanding media scandals better – how they arise, how they develop, how they gain energy, and how they are experienced. Previous research and theoretical points of departure One of the reasons for this emotion-orientated introduction to the topic is that such a perspective is missing in social-science-influenced media research, where emotions are often conspicuous by their absence. This may seem surprising because the field in fact quivers 6 Exposed with emotion, dealing as it does with a topic described by Norwegian media researchers Anders Todal Jenssen and Audun Fladmoe as exhibiting a special kind of aura which is largely occasioned by indignation. A person who comments on a scandal can show his or her anger without reservations through the choice of words and facial expressions. They write that words such as ‘shocking’, ‘scandalous’, and ‘reprehensible’ in combination with raised eyebrows and an indignant tone of voice are typical of media scandals (Jenssen & Fladmoe 2012:64). However, these authors do not conduct an in-depth analysis of the emotional expressions themselves in relation to the scandal. There is a gap to be filled here. In order to understand the scandal as a phenomenon, we need to understand the emotions it engenders. Research on media scandals gathered momentum during the beginning of the twenty-first century, not least in the Nordic countries, where two anthologies were published (Allern & Pollack 2009, 2012c). The fact that media scandals are more and more often the object of scientific analysis appears logical because public scandals are increasing in number, keeping pace with the expansion of the media industry. In a comparison among the Nordic countries, some researchers maintain that there has been a significant increase in the number of scandals during the most recent decades, where Sweden is in the lead with an almost fivefold increase during the period from 1980 to 2010 (Allern et al. 2012; see also Thompson 2008:106–18 for a discussion of the general increase in the West). Scholarly descriptions of the reasons for the increase in frequency are part of a picture of the industry with which we are nowadays quite familiar, where an increased number of actors and intensified competition – as well as convergence – among different media in an increasingly digitalised and competitive media market lead to a type of journalism that to an ever greater extent rests on a commercial rather than an ideological basis, sales figures coming before altruistic ideals (Deuze 2005:443–65, Allern & Pollack 2009:193–207, Deuze 2014:119–30). 2 A scholarly convention seems to have come into existence regarding how media scandals are to be studied. In line with that convention, several researchers have – besides counting scandals – to a great extent been busy defining what media scandals, particularly political scandals, are on the basis of an almost essentialist interest. This is done by determining the temporal and dramaturgical development of 2 I will return to this discussion in greater detail in Chapter 4. Introduction 7 scandals, creating typologies of media scandals, dividing scandals into genres, evaluating various currently popular terms and, in addition, introducing new names for them (see Sabato 1993, Lull & Hiner- man 1997, Wien & Elmelund-Præstekær 2007, 2009, Ekström & Johansson 2008, Allern et al. 2012, Boydstun et al. 2014, Jenssen & Fladmoe 2012). 3 Often this has to do with content studies, which means that the scholar in question examines media production in itself and its publications, often press materials. The project in which I am myself active has also conducted investigations of this type, and on the whole these provide valuable knowledge. When I use the term media scandal I lean on this research, but at the same time I regard it with circumspection. While following in the footsteps of these earlier studies, my ambition is to move beyond them. I want to argue that the human aspect is lost in this type of investigation. To be sure, these studies teach us more about the functions of the media – that is, after all, their express purpose – but rather little about the ways in which human beings function. Instead, I see the present book as a contribution to the few anthro- pologically influenced studies of mediated scandals (Bird 1997, 2003), as well as to those with a historical perspective (Thompson 2008, Darnton 1997, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2010) and those influenced by social psychology (Wästerfors 2005, 2008). As a natural consequence of my interest in the cultural dimension of media scandals, I am also interested in another type of communica- tion, namely that which takes place during interpersonal meetings. I want to explore how this kind of communication relates to com- munication conveyed through the media. Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s now classic analyses of the public sphere as an interaction between the media and the audience where mediated communication encounters interpersonal communication, such as conversations, actions, and the creation of public opinion, have influenced my understanding of the cultural dimension of media scandals and how 3 Such labels include political scandal , which is subdivided into sex scandal, financial scandal , and power scandal (Thompson 2008); closely related is the mediated political scandal (Midtbø 2007, Todal Jenssen 2014); the talk scandal , with its subcategories first-order talk scandal and second-order talk scandal (Ekström and Johansson, 2008); the moral scandal (Djerf-Pierre et al. 2013); the SMS scandal (Laine 2010); political wave-making (Wolfsfeld and Schaefer 2006); media hype (Elmelund-Præstekær & Wien 2008, 2009); and the media storm or media waves , with the subgenres wave storm , spike storm , and non-storm (Boydstun et al. 2014). 8 Exposed different forms of communication interact (see Dayan & Katz 1992). I have also been inspired by media researcher David Morley’s call for a kind of analytic decentralisation. He writes: ‘we need to “decentre” the media, in our analytical framework, so as to better understand the ways in which media processes and everyday life are interwoven with each other’ (Morley 2007:200). Like all ethnologists, I take everyday life as my point of departure. It is through a focus on everyday life that the function and significance of the media, and their importance in people’s lives, can be made visible. Hence, decentring the media does not mean that they are relegated to the background. Rather, I wish to show how deeply integrated they are into our culture and our everyday lives. Affects, emotions, feelings Should one, on the basis of the above, assume that studying emotions is not in favour within media studies? Not at all. A research survey lists over 400 studies within the media field where emotions (or, more correctly, affects) are foregrounded (Wirth & Schramm 2005). From the 1960s until the early twenty-first century traditional research on effects dominated the field, with a focus on emotional reactions to media consumption or media stimuli. Through experiments scholars have, for instance, studied facial expressions and other physical signals in order to connect reactions to certain types of media stimuli, or to map these reactions by way of interview answers. 4 The now heavily criticised tradition within media and communication studies of effects research – research built on stimulus–response models that were problematised as early as the 1970s (Gerbner & Gross 1976) – lives on, not least within the area of emotions. In summary, the interpretations of emotions within psychology, medicine, and cognitive science may be said to have had quite an 4 The belief in the possibility of measuring short- or long-term emotional effects resulting from people’s media use is not so easily dislodged. An impressively voluminous anthology with the title The Routledge Handbook of Emotions and Mass Media (Döveling et al. 2011) presents a number of studies on emotional expressions awakened as a result of mass-media consumption, with keywords such as measurement , gratification , response , control , influence , reactivity , persuasion , and coping . The majority of the writers focus on psychological effects and on the reactions of individuals as a consequence of media use, i.e., how these effects and reactions arise and are expressed within individuals. Introduction 9 impact on multidisciplinarily orientated media and communication studies, where emotions are often treated as phenomena that can be classified, categorised, and measured, and that are assumed to be important for a person’s inner life rather than for what is happening outside the individual human being. It is time to take this knowledge on board and venture to move towards a more context-orientated view of emotions, as sociologist Jack Katz argued almost two decades ago with the following exhorta- tion: ‘A next challenge is to develop empirically grounded explana- tions of emotions as they rise and decline in the vibrant flow of social life’ (Katz 1999:3). It is fair to say that Katz’s call was heeded. Alongside the production of psychologically focused studies, a newly awakened interest in perspectives on emotion in cultural analysis, sociology, and social psychology became apparent during the early twenty-first century and had an impact on a number of social-science disciplines as well as on society in general. As time went by, this development came to be known as the affective turn , foregrounding – among other things – an acute need for an academic rapprochement between different disciplines, such as psychology and sociology (see Clough & O’Malley Halley 2007). The key role of emotions in the elementary forms of social life had been neglected for a long time, certain theoreticians claimed, and that neglect had impeded a social- science-based understanding of the basic conditions of human beings here on earth. Since then, during the most recent decade, interdis- ciplinary studies of affects and emotions have spawned a veritable explosion of research and theory development within this area. In addition to supplying valuable knowledge, this has contributed vigorous discussions regarding the concepts being used, concepts which often mean different things to different scholars from various disciplines: affect , emotion , feeling , sentiment . Simply put, it may be said that affect is customarily used as an umbrella term which includes all the above-mentioned concepts, but it also denotes physical and internal experiences. Traditionally speaking, emotion has signified the social dimension of feelings, whereas the word feelings itself has mostly been used as a synonym for the two first-mentioned terms (see Frykman & Povrzanovi ć Frykman 2016:9–28 for an exhaustive survey of the concepts). I personally agree with the idea that it can be hazardous to insist too strongly on the differences between these concepts, because this, too, risks becoming a simplified classification of the emotions (Frykman & Povrzanovi ć Frykman 2016:15ff). It seems considerably more productive to focus on what emotions do rather than what they are . In this book, that view finds 10 Exposed expression in an ethnological method whereby emotions are observed in everyday life through ethnographic studies (Ahmed 2004:14, Frykman & Povrzanovi ć Frykman 2016:17ff). As ethnologists Jonas Frykman and Maja Povrzanovi ć Frykman write: ‘the focus on practice – what affect does – also tends to widen the scope for what it is ’ (Frykman & Povrzanovi ć Frykman 2016:16). Criticism has also been levelled at the very idea of the affective turn – did it happen at all? – and at literature which, in sweeping terms, maintains that the affective turn had a liberating influence on studies that deal with people’s lives. Therefore, I try to accept anthropologist Stef Jansen’s challenge regarding the need for clarification when briefly explaining my own points of departure below (Jansen 2016:55–79; see also Gilje 2016:31–55). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, in conjunction with the newly awakened interest in emotions in the social sciences, the study of emotions developed within Swedish ethnology as well, not least in Lund. As a result, this field of inquiry became more meth- odologically and theoretically useful than it had been before. Here, too, scholars dissociated themselves from the psychological and medical view of emotions while simultaneously using it as a point of departure. That view sometimes makes emotions appear as things held in a container within us, placed in what is usually, for lack of better words, called the soul, and this container may become full and overflow, making us ill if we do not empty it at regular intervals. The danger of such an instrumental view is that emotions are then only allowed to say something about our own internal existence and not about the world. Jean-Paul Sartre expresses his criticism of this view in explicit terms: ‘La conscience émotionnelle est d’abord conscience du monde’ (Sartre 2002:70) – ‘the emotional consciousness is primarily consciousness of the world’ (Sartre 2002:34). A point of departure for an ethnologist could thus be the use of empirical studies to try to understand how emotions make the world appear. Our interest should be directed at how my and other people’s individual emotions correspond to the world, reflect it, affect it, and transform it. Emotions are individual and universal at the same time. They are relational ‘interspatial phenomena’ and always actualise a relationship to the Other (Frykman & Löfgren 2005:17; see also Ehn & Löfgren 2004). As we all know, emotional states such as dread, fear, and elation have a strange ability to spread within a group. In fact, language is rich in expressions for how moods are transposed and reproduced non-verbally, as in the fol- lowing sentence: ‘The atmosphere was so dense that one could cut it with a knife’ (see Frykman 2012:23–36). Or, in the almost poetic Introduction 11 words of communications scholar Gregory Seigworth and cultural researcher Melissa Gregg: [C]ast forward by its open-ended in-between-ness, affect is integral to a body’s perpetual becoming (always becoming otherwise, however subtly, than what it already is), pulled beyond its seeming surface- boundedness by way of its relation to, indeed its composition through, the forces of encounter. With affect, a body is as much outside itself as in itself – webbed in its relations – until ultimately such firm distinctions cease to matter. (Gregg & Seigworth 2010:3; original emphasis) It is this intervening space between subjects, and the space between an individual and society, that Gregg and Seigworth feel can offer new paths to an understanding not only of emotions themselves but of the context, culture, and time in which they operate. Thus it is not emotions in themselves that are the object of study here; the intention is to use them as a point of departure in order to be better able to understand the social, cultural, and historical anchoring and significance of media scandals. Stef Jansen calls this ‘go[ing] beyond evocation’, one of several options for ethnologists and anthropolo- gists who study emotions (Jansen 2016:55–79). Their vagueness may entail analytical challenges, but that vagueness can also be considered an asset for the same reason; complex and ambiguous, emotions open up for the meeting between subject and object, instinct and fantasy, the conscious and the unconscious, body and thought, individual and collective. Emotions can function as indicators of inactivity, of something that is happening or is about to happen; a reiteration, a reinforcement, a change, a degradation (Frykman & Löfgren 2005:15). The fact that Swedish has a single word ( känsla ) for haptic experience, sensation, and mood can be confusing. For example, feeling grief can be indicated by the same word as touching something with one’s hand, a sensory quality: känna (feel/touch), just as the mood in a room can be described with the noun of the same word: känsla (mood). Here the English language is more precise. 5 5 Gender scholar Melissa Autumn White has written about the affective turn in relation to her own field of study in different contexts. She concisely explains the respective significance of and the differences among the three concepts emotion , feeling , and affect : ‘Where emotion might be thought of as a capture of affect – an “intensity owned and recognized” by the subject (Massumi 2002:28), and feeling closely linked to the perception and movement of sensation, Clough et al. draw on Deleuze (and ultimately Spinoza) to consider affect as intensity related to a capacity and potential to act. In a Spinozan sense, affect refers to the “power to act,” the simultaneous power to affect the world and to be affected by it’ (White 2007:183). 12 Exposed The point of departure in this book is, however, the word feelings , which is anchored in an everyday context to a greater extent than affects and emotions . Even so, I, too, am in need of synonyms when I write, which is why I also use other words. Very little research has been done on the experiences of the central figure of a media scandal, but they are not completely absent in the literature on the subject (Brurås 2004, Johansson 2006, Kepplinger 2007, 2016, Bjerke 2012; see also Pihlblad 2010, Karlsen & Duckert 2018). These studies contain traces of what I want to foreground in this study, namely how the stories in the media reach beyond the media context itself and into everyday life; but as a rule, a reader learns rather little about what these people have experienced on an emotional and existential level. The feelings experienced in a Swedish context by the central figures of the scandals I examine may, of course, be different from how scandals affect people in other cultural contexts. In the words of Harvard Professor Robert A. LeVine: ‘Rather than seeking to isolate the basic elements of universal building blocks of emotional experience, ethnographers seek to uncover and understand that experience in all its complexity in a particular setting’ (LeVine 2007:398; emphasis added). At the same time, the emotions that are described in this book have a universal character, not least shame, which is carefully studied in certain sections of the book. The lifeworld On the basis of the phenomenological concept of the lifeworld , I thus wish to study how the life of an individual is affected by a media scandal and how the scandal is manifested as an experi- ence, something that is related to the discussion above. ‘Feelings connect people to the surrounding world – feelings situate people in a lifeworld’, writes Frykman (2012:39). As has already been mentioned, I take my point of departure in the individual as an experiencer , an acting subject among other acting subjects, where the theoretical direction is taken from a phenomenological view of human beings as actors with a certain freedom of action. In their everyday lives they move, do things, plan, reflect on things, feel, sort, and organise their lives. Phenomenologist Alfred Schutz’s (1970, 1973, 1989) interpreta- tion of the lifeworld plays a particularly important role in the present book. He describes the lifeworld as the reality in which we live and which we take for granted, a world that is immediately and Introduction 13 directly experienced through the actions of the subject and his or her meetings with other subjects in everyday life. Schutz uses the expres- sion ‘the social, natural attitude’ to denote the original relationship between subject and world, our daily lives that make up the often overlooked prerequisite for all actions, all social intercourse, all emotions, and all reflections (Schutz 1973:59). A curiosity about people as acting beings, experiencers, and creators of meaning rather than as recipients and interpreters of diverse messages is the central starting-point in the present book, irrespective of whether I study them online or offline; that curiosity also connects my work to that of researchers who have emphasised the importance of a phenomenological and existential attitude to communication and media. We create meaning through that which surrounds us. Here I find phenomenologist and media scholar Amanda Lagerkvist’s studies inspiring. Her simple and beautiful phrase ‘questions concern- ing digital technologies are ... questions about human existence’ (Lagerkvist 2017:97) forms a kind of point of departure for my research as well. On the basis of Martin Heidegger’s concept of thrownness , Lagerkvist poses the initial question: ‘ What does it mean to be a human being in the digital age? ’ (Lagerkvist 2017:97; original emphasis). She believes that a new form of idiosyncratic, existential vulnerability has taken shape alongside the development towards what is called the ‘culture of connectivity’, a process which originates in digital technology and which to a great extent takes place through social media (Lagerkvist 2017). What surrounds us is also something we are forced to begin from and relate to. Focusing on everyday life, it becomes clear that encounters among people, things, and places are something we have to think about and deal with; those encounters form the ‘ready-to-hand’ that causes the results of our actions to mostly be something completely different from what we originally expected (Frykman 2012:21). Lagerkvist writes: Following Heidegger, our thrownness implies being faced with a world where we are precariously situated in a particular place, at a particular historical moment, and among a particular crowd with the inescapable task of tackling our world around us and making it meaningful. (Lagerkvist 2017:97) The present book will, I hope, contribute curious, open questions, with the scandal as a phenomenon at the centre of attention. In my view, mediated scandals say something specific about what it means to be a human being among other human beings, or, if you will, a